Realism: Invictus is the Beyond the Sword version of the Civilization 4 mod that was formerly known "Total Realism" when it was being developed for Warlords expansion pack of Civilization 4. Our mod has been with Civ since the earliest days; it was, back when it was called just "Realism", among the first comprehensive modpacks seeking to rebalance the game.

For many years now, the mod continues its life and its evolution. Although it had its highs and lows, it is still going strong today, and truly stands for what can be called a project of Civ 4 community ("Invictus" wound up being in our title for a reason!). Over the years of its existence, it has given a lot to other Civ 4 community projects, and it has incorporated even more of other people's work. It was never intended, and could never happen, as anyone's personal project - at any given time of its existence, the mod had a team of several people working on it, and it was always their collective vision that brought it forward.

Our mod in its current state is designed to be run on Beyond the Sword or Civ 4 Complete patched to latest available version (3.19). Steam version and pretty much all other PC versions of Civ 4 are supported.

Dear friends, I am delighted to yet again present the new version of Realism: Invictus mod. For years now we've been constantly improving it, and by now I can safely claim that it can provide a vast amount of balanced, polished and great-looking content. So, what is new compared to 3.1?

Added three new bundled random map scripts. While you may, as before, use any random map script you choose, these are balanced specifically for our mod and take special care when placing all the new features.

New scenario – Triassic Earth map. A what-if Earth map that places all civilizations on their approximate starting spots on continental plates in Triassic period, when all continents were joined into the original Pangaea supercontinent.

Added a set of derivative civilizations: these unplayable civs will spawn when a major civ releases a colony. You will no longer release Celts as China or Zulus as Aztec! Preferred derivative civ can also change over time. All of them have one leader, one NU and NB, and no NI.

Added two new playable civilizations: Austronesia and Transoxiana, with full appropriate set of leaders, flavor units, GP splashes, NU, NB, NI, etc.

Added many leaders to existing civilizations. No civilization currently has less than 4, most have 5-6. Tweaked traits of new and existing leaders to cover most available trait combos.

Trait Organized split into Legislator and Administrator.

When choosing civics, AI is now very conscious of their advantages and drawbacks and how they suit particular leaders’ playstyle.

Added a great deal of new agricultural terrain improvements to reflect the development of agriculture through history.

Your agricultural productivity now affected significantly by your technologies, civics and infrastructure. Take a time to read about it in the manual, the system is quite in-depth.

Citizens eat 3 food each. Don’t worry, the new system allows you to produce enough food in the long run.

Added new terrain features that will appear on most random maps and are used in scenarios: savannah, hot springs, fertile soils.

Rebalanced and reworked siege units. They are also now better at their direct purpose, and some of them are also quite formidable on the battlefield. AI taught how to better use ranged bombardment.

Ranged bombardment now provides experience. Siege units can be promoted once again.

Added new and reworked many existing flavor units.

Very significantly reworked promotion tree.

Instead of one overcrowded malus, there is a whole new congestion system. Malus for too many units is now dependent on technology and on whether the stack is in the city or not.

Added one new and brought back several old doctrines.

Military unit costs increased across the board.

Significantly overhauled barbarians. XP gain from barbarians now capped, but there are special anti-barbarian promos that raise this cap.

Merged K-Mod and most of its awesome changes.

Reworked most civics. Some were removed and new added in their place. Overall all civic lines are now much more logical and somewhat better balanced. New civics have new buildings/wonders associated with them.

Having vassals no longer brings extra happiness.

Many tweaks in prerequisite techs for smoother technology progression. Tech costs rebalanced across the board for slower techs in later eras.

All difficulty levels are rebalanced. AI no longer gets undocumented bonuses, and all bonuses associated with different difficulty levels are now accessible through pedia.

New art era progression system – each art era gives you +10% to your culture output. Also tied to new system where instead of “culture bomb”, Great Artists are able to create various Great Works – minor World Wonders with large culture outputs.

Tons of new GP splashes added (around 600 new and many of old reworked).

Two new flavors for Solar Cult: Mediterranean civs get Cult of Sol Invictus, African and Middle Eastern civs get Cult of Aten with all corresponding buildings, wonders and missionaries (changes are purely cosmetic, all the gameplay effects stay the same).

Many buildings that didn’t have those before get cultural flavor looks for less patchwork-looking cities. Some new citystyles added for more diversity.

Tons and tons of unit art files updated or replaced by better models. Unit scales adjusted to be more consistent. Most models and textures used are also less complex, leading to less system strain.

National and heroic epics are now civ-flavored, with appropriate button art.

Added new main menu background and music.

Added new music for several eras.

Added voiceovers for all techs that were missing them.

100% reworked new pedia interface that offers much more information on different gameplay aspects, with robust search and filtering features. Other screens also reworked with a lot of small tweaks providing interface hints for various RI aspects.

There should no longer be any leaders with bugged greetings messages.

Rebel slaves and serfs now increase in strength every era, as originally intended (a couple of era transitions were missing).

Fixed many typos and a lot of bad grammar in the text files.

Fixed most leftover bugs and incorrect references in BtS events and quests.

Fixed all overlapping keyboard shortcuts. All shortcuts now assigned to unique key combos.

Help! I've played the Total Realism, but it lagged a lot! And then I realized that Realism Invictus was the "Total Realism" for BTS. I downloaded the full version. And then I installed it correctly. (Including the patch)

I started the game, (slow loading at the beginning)everything seemed fine and when I started the World Map it loaded a bit, but at the Graphic thing a C++ window pops up and tells that the "program has done something unusual" and that the BTS.exe couldn't run. And that I should contact the support team or something like that.

Congratulations to all the team for this great mod.
Up to now random maps work fine, but every time I try to start the World map it crashes during the "Init graphics" loading part. It says Visual C Runtime error on the executable.
I've tried many combinations of the options and ever loaded from the scenario menu but still nothing.
Mod is 3.0+patch 3.01, seems installed ok, custom folders empty, Civ4 version is the Complete at 3.19 of course (runs most mods fine), OS is windows vista 32 sp2 updated all the time.

I wouldn't try to run the World Map on a 32-bit OS. It is too large and RAM-hungry; Civ 4 engine will cause memory allocation crashes on 32-bit systems - I guess you're running into one even before starting the game.

It keeps crashing on startup. I tell it to load the mod and it doesn't even come up with the loading screen. I installed it with Desura, and the same thing happens whether I load it through Desura or the game itself. T-T

That shouldn't; people with Complete editions also launched the mod normally. Even people with Steam versions. Actually, I am pretty puzzled, because this behaviour wasn't reported in other places our mod is hosted.

Please try download full 3.0 installer directly from our Sourceforge page; since I don't control Desura directly, I can't vouch that their installer works 100% (although it works for me): Sourceforge.net